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Reports of Andrew Plant as he travels with Dr. Sue Wilson and two of her colleagues from the Tumaini Fund:

Tuesday 31st January

Speaking to Adrian Gidney on Morning Report at 8.40am

Yesterday we flew to Kigali in Rwanda which is the capital of Rwanda. I was pretty nervous about coming here as it was pretty much destroyed by genocide in 1994 but it has actually come on a long way since then.

We left about half past seven in order to travel from Kigali in Rwanda, to the boarder at Resumo, Tanzania. That’s the really difficult leg of our journey and the last one we have to do before we get to the place where the Tumaini workers are going to be concentrating.

It’s not an easy place to travel in. I’m told last year that all the roads here were just dirt tracks. This year there is a lot of tarmac to drive on so its a bit easier to get around.

But we keep getting stopped by police and they are quite heavily armed. They check your papers and they make travelling a little bit difficult and not a very nice experience.

We’ve just had our second stop literally about five minutes ago. So it’s not the easiest place in the world to travel.

The view is scrub land and hills; there’s a lot of trees, a few houses and it is getting extremely hot.

We left early this morning, partly because of the heat and also to make good time.

During the day it gets up to around 30ºC. It’s a very wet heat though and you start off the day getting a little bit sweaty. And you never really dry until you have a shower and go to bed at night when it gets colder.

The other reason we left so early this morning is that the three local people we’ve got accompanying us in the van have got to come all the way back from the boarder. They have to go right back to Kigali in Rwanda and that’s going to take them another 4 or 5 hours.

It’s imperative that they don’t travel on this road at night as it is just not safe.

You don’t feel particularly safe here, I think it’s far better than it was now the roads are tarmac.

You tend to see a lot of evidence that the infrastructure is being re-built. There is money coming into the country, there are charities at work here and there is tangible evidence that things are moving on.

But the police are heavily armed, they have their guns half cocked and they don’t instil you with a lot of confidence to be honest.

And I would not travel on these roads at night simply because the locals don’t, they say that its bandit county and it’s not something that you want to be doing.

We are really heading into rural areas here, this is real scrub land, there are a few farms dotted around and people working on the land. But as we go further, with every mile we go along, the road becomes more and more rural and I think once we actually hit Tanzania we are not going to see any major cities like we’ve seen in Rwanda. And I don’t think we are going to see any development either, I think it really is just about people living off the land and very much hand to mouth.

I know that we are staying in several different small villages but it is literally little mud huts. There are not many bricks out here and if there is they are mud bricks.

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Listen in

The journey will be covered on BBC Radio Guernsey on Morning Report each day between 30th January and 9th February at 8.40am and you'll be able to read a diary account here.